TITLE: Threshold
NAME: James Moore
COUNTRY: US
EMAIL: jtm11@bellsouth.net
TOPIC: Surrealism
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: threshol.jpg
ZIPFILE: threshol.zip
RENDERER USED:
Povray 3.5
TOOLS USED:
Paint Shop Pro, The Gimp, Povray 3.5
RENDER TIME:
3 hrs 15 min, 127 MB peak memory
HARDWARE USED:
AMD Athlon XP 1900, 1 GB RAM
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
There seems to exist a certain threshold of awareness above and below which
concepts and memories are distorted and obscured. In this narrow band of the
imagination, ideas stretch from the murky depths of the subconcious to the
soaring heights of revelation.
DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
I was really excited about the topic this round, but as usual, struggled with
translating the topic into an idea of an image. Also, as usual, the final
image is almost totally different from the original concept.
The trees were made of blobs and meshes using recursive macros. There are ten
different trees created by using the same macro with different random seeds,
each rotated, scaled and placed randomly. To reduce memory use and allow for
more complexity, I had the macro create an inc file for each of the 10 trees
rather than the actual objects. Each file is 4.5 MB in size and is over
100,000 lines long. I didn't include them in the source zip file due to the
sizes, but I did include the pov file used to make them.
The reeds are meshes also created by using different random seeds with a single
set of macros.
Everything else is simple CSG and primitives. The keyboard is a heightfield.
The bottle is a lathe. The monitors and camera are unions of rounded boxes,
cylinders and triangles. The mice are unions of bicubic patches and prisms.
The various cords and water creature are sphere sweeps. The bird is a blob.
Most of the textures except the keyboard and bottle labels and the clock face,
which are all image maps, are procedural. The ripped part of the bottle label
was made using transparency in Paint Shop Pro. The "first post" type image on
the hanging monitor is an image map produced by Povray.
The three hour render is mainly a result of the AA settings used - which still
left a few jagged edges here and there.
All comments, criticism and advise are greatly appreciated.